Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter #1)
J.K. Rowling, 1997
Scholastic, Inc.
309 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780545069670

Summary
In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry, an orphan, lives with the Dursleys, his horrible aunt and uncle, and their abominable son, Dudley.

One day just before his eleventh birthday, an owl tries to deliver a mysterious letter—the first of a sequence of events that end in Harry meeting a giant man named Hagrid. Hagrid explains Harry's history to him: When he was a baby, the Dark wizard, Lord Voldemort, attacked and killed his parents in an attempt to kill Harry; but the only mark on Harry was a mysterious lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

Now he has been invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where the headmaster is the great wizard Albus Dumbledore. Harry visits Diagon Alley to get his school supplies, especially his very own wand. To get to school, he takes the Hogwarts Express from platform nine and three-quarters at King's Cross Station. On the train, he meets two fellow students who will become his closest friends: Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.

Harry is assigned to Gryffindor House at Hogwarts, and soon becomes the youngest-ever Seeker on the House Quidditch team. He also studies Potions with Professor Severus Snape, who displays a deep and abiding dislike for Harry, and Defense Against the Dark Arts with nervous Professor Quirrell; he and his friends defeat a mountain troll, help Hagrid raise a dragon, and explore the wonderful, fascinating world of Hogwarts.

But all events lead irrevocably toward a second encounter with Lord Voldemort, who seeks an object of legend known as the Sorcerer's Stone... (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—July 31, 1965
• Where—Chipping Sodbury near Bristol, England (UK)
• Education—Exeter University
• Awards—3 Nestle Smarties Awards; British Book Award-
   Children's Book of the Year; Children's Book Award;
   Whitbread Children's Book of the Year; British Book Awards-
   Author of the Year; British Book Awards-Book of the Year.
• Currently—lives in Perthshire, Scotland and London, England

Joanne "Jo" Rowling, better known under the pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author known as the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series, the idea for which was conceived while on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies, and been the basis for a popular series of films.

Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years. As of March 2010, when its latest world billionaires list was published, Forbes estimated Rowling's net worth to be $1 billion. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £560 million ($798 million), ranking her as the twelfth richest woman in Great Britain. Forbes ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007, and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fandom. She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and the Children's High Level Group.

Early years
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (nee Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16.1 km) northeast of Bristol. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce. (The school's headmaster has been suggested as the inspiration for Harry Potter's Albus Dumbledore).

As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would read to her sister. "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called "Rabbit." He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." When she was a young teenager, her great aunt gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.

She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother, Anne, had worked as a technician in the Science Department. Rowling has said of her adolescence, "Hermione [A bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley [Harry Potter's best friend] isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."

Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. After a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.

In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately. In December of that same year, Rowling’s mother died, after a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis, a death that heavily affected her writing: she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992. Their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born in 1993 in Portugal. The couple separated in November 1993. In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.

After Jessica's birth and the separation from her husband, Rowling had left her teaching job in Portugal. In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995, after completing her first novel while having survived on state welfare support.

She wrote in many cafes, especially Nicolson's Cafe, whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. As she stated on the American TV program A&E Biography, one of the reasons she wrote in cafes was not because her flat had no heat, but because taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.

Harry Potter books
In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by Bloomsbury, a small British publishing house in London, England. The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.

Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, her editor Barry Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. Soon after, in 1997, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc., for $105,000. Rowling has said she “nearly died” when she heard the news.

In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print-run of 1000 copies, five hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are valued between £16,000 and £25,000. Five months later, the book won its first award, a Nestle Smarties Book Prize. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year, and later, the Children’s Book Award. Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July, 1998.

In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000, and broke sales records in both countries. Some 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all literary sales records. Rowling admitted that she had had a moment of crisis while writing the novel; "Halfway through writing Four, I realised there was a serious fault with the plot....I've had some of my blackest moments with this book..... One chapter I rewrote 13 times, though no-one who has read it can spot which one or know the pain it caused me." Rowling was named author of the year in the 2000 British Book Awards.

A wait of three years occurred between the release of Goblet of Fire and the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This gap led to press speculation that Rowling had developed writer's block, speculations she fervently denied. Rowling later admitted that writing the book was a chore. "I think Phoenix could have been shorter", she told Lev Grossman, "I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end."

The sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on 16 July 2005. It too broke all sales records, selling nine million copies in its first 24 hours of release. While writing, she told a fan online, "Book six has been planned for years, but before I started writing seriously I spend two months re-visiting the plan and making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing." She noted on her website that the opening chapter of book six, which features a conversation between the Minister of Magic and the British Prime Minister, had been intended as the first chapter first for Philosopher's Stone, then Chamber of Secrets then Prisoner of Azkaban. In 2006, Half-Blood Prince received the Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July, 2007, (0:00 BST) and broke its predecessor's record as the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 11 million copies in the first day of release in the United Kingdom and United States. She has said that the last chapter of the book was written "in something like 1990", as part of her earliest work on the entire series. During a year period when Rowling was completing the last book, she allowed herself to be filmed for a documentary which aired in Britain on ITV on 30 December 2007. It was entitled J K Rowling... A Year In The Life and showed her returning to her old Edinburgh tenement flat where she lived, and completed the first Harry Potter book. Re-visiting the flat for the first time reduced her to tears, saying it was "really where I turned my life around completely."

Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated £7 billion ($15 billion), and the last four Harry Potter books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history. The series, totalling 4,195 pages, has been translated, in whole or in part, into 65 languages.

The Harry Potter books have also gained recognition for sparking an interest in reading among the young at a time when children were thought to be abandoning books for computers and television, although the series' overall impact on children's reading habits has been questioned.

Life after Harry Potter
Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books, the second-richest female entertainer and the 1,062nd richest person in the world. When first listed as a billionaire by Forbes in 2004, Rowling disputed the calculations and said she had plenty of money, but was not a billionaire. In addition, the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List named Rowling the 144th richest person in Britain. In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious nineteenth-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a £4.5 million ($9 million) Georgian house in Kensington, West London, (on a street with 24-hour security).

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Michael Murray (born 30 June 1971), an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her Aberfeldy home. Their son was born in 2003 and a daughter in 2005.

In the UK, Rowling has received honorary degrees from St Andrews University, the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, the University of Exeter and the University of Aberdeen; and in the US, from Harvard. She has been awarded the Légion d'honneur by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (During the Elysée Palace ceremony, she revealed that her maternal French grandfather had also received the Légion d'honneur for his bravery during World War I.) According to Matt Latimer, a former White House administrator for President George W. Bush, Rowling was turned down for the Presidential Medal of Freedom because administration officials believed that the Harry Potter series promoted witchcraft.

Subsequent writing
Rowling has stated that she plans to continue writing, preferably under a pseudonym. Although she "thinks it's unlikely" that she will write another Harry Potter, an "encyclopedia" of wizarding along with unpublished notes may be published sometime in the future. In March 2008, Rowling revealed in interview that she had returned to writing in Edinburgh cafes, intent on composing a new novel for children. "I will continue writing for children because that's what I enjoy," she told the Daily Telegraph. "I am very good at finding a suitable cafe; I blend into the crowd and, of course, I don't sit in the middle of the bar staring all around me." (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
You don't have to be a wizard or a kid to appreciate the spell cast by Harry Potter.
USA Today

A wonderful first novel.... Harry is destined for greatness...and one day he mysteriously receives a notice in the mail announcing that he has been chosen to attend Hogwarts, the nation's elite school for training wizards and witches, the Harvard of sorcery. Before he is done, Harry Potter will meet a dragon, make friends with a melancholy centaur and do battle with a three-headed dog.... Through all this hocus-pocus is delightful, the magic in the book is not the real magic of the book. Much like Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling has a gift for keeping the emotions, fears and triumphs of her characters on a human scale, even while the supernatural is popping out all over.
Michael Winerip - New York Times Book Review

When Harry's parents die, he has no idea of his real heritage or his destiny. He is treated dastardly by his neglectful aunt and uncle but from the moment of his eleventh birthday, he is summoned to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry where his training begins. The reader embarks on an adventure that continues through the very last page. 309 pages of entertainment filled with magic, sorcery, good vs. evil and a courageous protagonist, eleven-year-old Harry Potter.
Children's Literature

Harry Potter, who believes that his parents were killed in a car accident when he was a baby, lives with his dreadful relatives, the Dursleys. Imagine his surprise when, on his eleventh birthday, he is invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry learns that he is a wizard, just as his parents had been, and that he survived the attack in which they were killed battling the evil Voldemort. At Hogwarts, Harry discovers his natural skill at Quidditch, a type of three-dimensional rugby played on flying brooms; he tastes new treats such as "Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans," which truly do come in every flavor from strawberry and coffee to sardine and ear wax; and he learns that there is evil afoot at the school. Harry and his friends, Ron and Hermoine, discover that someone at the school is trying to steal a priceless stone with the power to make a person immortal. In a breathtaking final showdown, Harry faces Voldemort and saves the stone, but not before he nearly loses his life. Rowling's style is a cross between Roald Dahl and Patricia Wrede. First published in Britain, where it won the British National Book Award for Children's Book of the Year as well as the Smarties Prize, this hilarious and suspenseful book will delight American audiences as well.
VOYA

(Starred review.) Readers are in for a delightful romp with this debut from a British author who dances in the footsteps of P.L. Travers and Roald Dahl.
Publishers Weekly

A rousing first novel, an award-winner in England. Harry is just a baby when his magical parents are done in by Voldemort, a wizard so dastardly other wizards are scared to mention his name. So Harry is brought up by his mean Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia Dursley, and picked on by his horrid cousin Dudley. He knows nothing about his magical birthright until 10 years later, when he learns he's to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Hogwarts is a lot like English boarding school, except that instead of classes in math and grammar, the curriculum features courses in Transfiguration, Herbology, and Defense Against the Dark Arts. Harry becomes the star player of Quidditch, a sort of mid-air ball game. With the help of his new friends Ron and Hermione, Harry solves a mystery involving a sorcerer's stone that ultimately takes him to the evil Voldemort. This hugely enjoyable fantasy is filled with imaginative details, from oddly flavored jelly beans to dragons' eggs hatched on the hearth. It's slanted toward action-oriented readers, who will find that Briticisms meld with all the other wonders of magic school.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone:

1. If Harry is so famous in the wizarding world (people actually bow to him in the streets) why is he forced to live with the evil Dursleys for ten years?

2. Gryffindor looks for loyalty, chivalry and courage. Hufflepuff values friendship, hark work and patience. Ravenclaw picks students with knowledge, intelligence and wit. Slytherin has wizards that are resourceful, cunning and ambitious. Which house would you like to be Sorted into?

3. The Forbidden Forest is off-limits to Hogwarts students but later, it is the place where Harry serves his first detention. Do you think there's been a change in the opinion of Hogwarts officials regarding Harry's ability to handle danger? If so, how did this change come about?

4. How would you spend an afternoon on Diagon Alley? Meeting the goblins at Gringotts? Studying spells at Flourish and Blotts? Testing brooms at Quality Quidditch Supplies?

5. There are some humorous character names at Hogwarts. The three-headed dog is named Fluffy, the Professor of Herbology is Professor Sprout. Can you think of any other examples?

6. While choosing his wand at Ollivanders, Harry finds out that the wand right for him shares a special connection to the wand stold to Voldemort. What do you think this connection symbolizes?

7. The story is told through Harry's view, except for the first chapter which is told through Mr. Dursley's point of view. Why does the author choose to tell us the story with Dursley's thoughts and reactions instead of a third-person story? What does it add to the story?

8. The Mirror of Erised shows the most desperate desire of our hearts. Professor Dumbledore told Harry that if he stood in front of the mirror, he would see himself holding a thair of thick, woolen socks. What would you see?

9. Although he knows he is disobeying an order from a teacher, Harry takes flight on a broomstick during an afternoon class. However, instead of being punished, he is named Gryffindor's Seeker on the Quidditch team. Name other instances when Harry broke the rules but was not punished.

10. Who did you expect Harry to encounter once through the trapdoor? Were you surprised? Recall clues to this identity.

(Questions by Kather O'Connor of LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter #2)
J.K. Rowling, 1998
Scholastic, Inc.
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780439064873

Summary
In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the summer after Harry’s first year at Hogwarts has been his worst summer ever...the Dursleys more distant and horrible than ever before. But just as he’s packing his bags to return to school, a creature named Dobby the house-elf announces that if Harry goes back to Hogwarts, disaster will strike.

And it turns out, Dobby is right. Harry and Ron miss the Hogwarts Express, so they fly to school in a blue Ford Anglia, crash landing in the notorious Whomping Willow. Soon other worries accumulate: the outrageously stuck-up new professor Gilderoy Lockhart; a ghost named Moaning Myrtle, who haunts the girls' bathroom; the strange behavior of Ron's little sister, Ginny Weasley; rumors about the "Chamber of Secrets," a cavern buried deep below Hogwarts; and a magical diary owned by Tom Riddle, a Hogwarts student of long ago.

Harry is also shocked to discover that he can speak Parseltongue, the language of snakes—a rare ability that Lord Voldemort also possessed—and that anti-Muggle prejudice exists in the Wizarding world, even affecting Harry's friend Hermione.

But all of these seem like minor concerns when someone starts turning Hogwarts students to stone: an evildoer said to be the fearsome Heir of Salazar Slytherin, on of the founders of the school. Could it be Draco Malfoy, Harry's most poisonous rival? Could it be Hagrid whose mysterious past is finally told? Or could it be the one person everyone at Hogwarts most suspects: Harry Potter himself? (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—July 31, 1965
• Where—Chipping Sodbury near Bristol, England (UK)
• Education—Exeter University
• Awards—3 Nestle Smarties Awards; British Book Award-
   Children's Book of the Year; Children's Book Award;
   Whitbread Children's Book of the Year; British Book Awards-
   Author of the Year; British Book Awards-Book of the Year.
• Currently—lives in Perthshire, Scotland and London, England

Joanne "Jo" Rowling, better known under the pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author known as the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series, the idea for which was conceived while on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies, and been the basis for a popular series of films.

Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years. As of March 2010, when its latest world billionaires list was published, Forbes estimated Rowling's net worth to be $1 billion. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £560 million ($798 million), ranking her as the twelfth richest woman in Great Britain. Forbes ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007, and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fandom. She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and the Children's High Level Group.

Early years
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (nee Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16.1 km) northeast of Bristol. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce. (The school's headmaster has been suggested as the inspiration for Harry Potter's Albus Dumbledore).

As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would read to her sister. "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called "Rabbit." He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." When she was a young teenager, her great aunt gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.

She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother, Anne, had worked as a technician in the Science Department. Rowling has said of her adolescence, "Hermione [A bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley [Harry Potter's best friend] isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."

Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. After a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.

In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately. In December of that same year, Rowling’s mother died, after a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis, a death that heavily affected her writing: she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992. Their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born in 1993 in Portugal. The couple separated in November 1993. In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.

After Jessica's birth and the separation from her husband, Rowling had left her teaching job in Portugal. In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995, after completing her first novel while having survived on state welfare support.

She wrote in many cafes, especially Nicolson's Cafe, whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. As she stated on the American TV program A&E Biography, one of the reasons she wrote in cafes was not because her flat had no heat, but because taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.

Harry Potter books
In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by Bloomsbury, a small British publishing house in London, England. The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.

Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, her editor Barry Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. Soon after, in 1997, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc., for $105,000. Rowling has said she “nearly died” when she heard the news.

In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print-run of 1000 copies, five hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are valued between £16,000 and £25,000. Five months later, the book won its first award, a Nestle Smarties Book Prize. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year, and later, the Children’s Book Award. Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July, 1998.

In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000, and broke sales records in both countries. Some 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all literary sales records. Rowling admitted that she had had a moment of crisis while writing the novel; "Halfway through writing Four, I realised there was a serious fault with the plot....I've had some of my blackest moments with this book..... One chapter I rewrote 13 times, though no-one who has read it can spot which one or know the pain it caused me." Rowling was named author of the year in the 2000 British Book Awards.

A wait of three years occurred between the release of Goblet of Fire and the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This gap led to press speculation that Rowling had developed writer's block, speculations she fervently denied. Rowling later admitted that writing the book was a chore. "I think Phoenix could have been shorter", she told Lev Grossman, "I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end."

The sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on 16 July 2005. It too broke all sales records, selling nine million copies in its first 24 hours of release. While writing, she told a fan online, "Book six has been planned for years, but before I started writing seriously I spend two months re-visiting the plan and making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing." She noted on her website that the opening chapter of book six, which features a conversation between the Minister of Magic and the British Prime Minister, had been intended as the first chapter first for Philosopher's Stone, then Chamber of Secrets then Prisoner of Azkaban. In 2006, Half-Blood Prince received the Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July, 2007, (0:00 BST) and broke its predecessor's record as the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 11 million copies in the first day of release in the United Kingdom and United States. She has said that the last chapter of the book was written "in something like 1990", as part of her earliest work on the entire series. During a year period when Rowling was completing the last book, she allowed herself to be filmed for a documentary which aired in Britain on ITV on 30 December 2007. It was entitled J K Rowling... A Year In The Life and showed her returning to her old Edinburgh tenement flat where she lived, and completed the first Harry Potter book. Re-visiting the flat for the first time reduced her to tears, saying it was "really where I turned my life around completely."

Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated £7 billion ($15 billion), and the last four Harry Potter books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history. The series, totalling 4,195 pages, has been translated, in whole or in part, into 65 languages.

The Harry Potter books have also gained recognition for sparking an interest in reading among the young at a time when children were thought to be abandoning books for computers and television, although the series' overall impact on children's reading habits has been questioned.

Life after Harry Potter
Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books, the second-richest female entertainer and the 1,062nd richest person in the world. When first listed as a billionaire by Forbes in 2004, Rowling disputed the calculations and said she had plenty of money, but was not a billionaire. In addition, the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List named Rowling the 144th richest person in Britain. In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious nineteenth-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a £4.5 million ($9 million) Georgian house in Kensington, West London, (on a street with 24-hour security).

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Michael Murray (born 30 June 1971), an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her Aberfeldy home. Their son was born in 2003 and a daughter in 2005.

In the UK, Rowling has received honorary degrees from St Andrews University, the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, the University of Exeter and the University of Aberdeen; and in the US, from Harvard. She has been awarded the Légion d'honneur by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (During the Elysée Palace ceremony, she revealed that her maternal French grandfather had also received the Légion d'honneur for his bravery during World War I.) According to Matt Latimer, a former White House administrator for President George W. Bush, Rowling was turned down for the Presidential Medal of Freedom because administration officials believed that the Harry Potter series promoted witchcraft.

Subsequent writing
Rowling has stated that she plans to continue writing, preferably under a pseudonym. Although she "thinks it's unlikely" that she will write another Harry Potter, an "encyclopedia" of wizarding along with unpublished notes may be published sometime in the future. In March 2008, Rowling revealed in interview that she had returned to writing in Edinburgh cafes, intent on composing a new novel for children. "I will continue writing for children because that's what I enjoy," she told the Daily Telegraph. "I am very good at finding a suitable cafe; I blend into the crowd and, of course, I don't sit in the middle of the bar staring all around me." (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
Those needing a hit of magic, morality and mystical worlds can do no better than opening Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets...Older readers will be able to bite into these meaty themes of racism and suspicion of stangers. But younger readers and those looking for the simple pleasures of a delightful read will be thrilled to be back at the fabulously witchy world of Hogwarts. —Cathy Hainer
USA Today

Harry Potter fans will be positively thrilled with this continuation of his trials and tribulations of growing up as a young wizard caught between the supernatural and muggle (real people) worlds. Whisked away in a flying car near the end of a confining, torturous summer with the Dursleys, Harry returns to Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. He does this despite numerous warnings and obstacles from about his potential doom. The legend of the Chamber of Secrets appears to be a reality. Petrified school mates, a bathroom ghost named Moaning Myrtle, the reference library, a diary and super-sleuthing lead a familiar cast of characters through this fast-paced who-dunnit. New readers unfamiliar with the previous adventure will be just as enthralled with this fantasy-adventure-mystery tale.
Children's Literature

Fans of the phenomenally popular Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Scholastic, 1998) won't be disappointed when they rejoin Harry, now on break after finishing his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Reluctantly spending the summer with the Dursleys, his mean relatives who fear and detest magic, Harry is soon whisked away by his friends Ron, Fred, and George Weasley, who appear at his window in a flying Ford Anglia to take him away to enjoy the rest of the holidays with their very wizardly family. Things don't go as well, though, when the school term begins. Someone, or something, is (literally) petrifying Hogwarts' residents one by one and leaving threatening messages referring to a Chamber of Secrets and an heir of Slytherin. Somehow, Harry is often around when the attacks happen and he is soon suspected of being the perpetrator. The climax has Harry looking very much like Indiana Jones, battling a giant serpent in the depths of the awesome and terrible Chamber of Secrets. Along with most of the teachers and students introduced in the previous book, Draco Malfoy has returned for his second year and is more despicable than ever. The novel is marked throughout by the same sly and sophisticated humor found in the first book, along with inventive, new, matter-of-fact uses of magic that will once again have readers longing to emulate Harry and his wizard friends. —Susan L. Rogers, Chestnut Hill Academy, PA
School Library Journal

With a year at Hogwarts School under his belt, Harry expects the new term to go smoothly, but a wizard's share of surprises and adventures await the likable lad and his friends. Rowling works her magic and leaves readers begging for more.
Library Journal

The mystery, zany humor, sense of a traditional British school (albeit with its share of ghosts, including Moaning Myrtle who haunts the girls' bathroom), student rivalry, and eccentric faculty, all surrounded by the magical foundation so necessary in good fantasy, are as expertly crafted here as in the first book. Fans who have been thirsting for this sequel will definitely not feel any disappointment. In fact, once they have read it, they will be lusting for the next. —Sally Estes
Booklist

This sequel to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998) brings back the doughty young wizard-in-training to face suspicious adults, hostile classmates, fretful ghosts, rambunctious spells, giant spiders, and even an avatar of Lord Voldemort, the evil sorcerer who killed his parents, while saving the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from a deadly, mysterious menace. Ignoring a most peculiar warning, Harry kicks off his second year at Hogwarts after a dreadful summer with his hateful guardians, the Dursleys, and is instantly cast into a whirlwind of magical pranks and misadventures, culminating in a visit to the hidden cavern where his friend Ron's little sister Ginny lies, barely alive, in a trap set by his worst enemy. Surrounded by a grand mix of wise and inept faculty, sneering or loyal peers—plus an array of supernatural creatures including Nearly Headless Nick and a huge, serpentine basilisk—Harry steadily rises to every challenge, and though he plays but one match of the gloriously chaotic field game Quidditch, he does get in plenty of magic and a bit of swordplay on his way to becoming a hero again. Readers will be irresistibly drawn into Harry's world by GrandPre's comic illustrations and Rowling's expert combination of broad boarding school farce and high fantasy.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:

1. Have you read the The Sorcerer's Stone? If so, did The Chamber of Secrets pick up as you thought it would? If you haven't read The Sorcerer's Stone were you able to easily understand this book?

2. Why do some characters, for example Moaning Myrtle and Nearly-Headless Nick, not leave the world after death? Is it a choice they make themselves? Why isn't Harry able to interact with his dead parents?

3. Do you think that Professor Lockhart is a malicious character or is he simply egocentric? How did your opinion of him change throughout the book?

4. If you could mix up a batch of Polyjuice Potion who would you want to be and why?

5. Why is Harry terrified that he may have some connection to Salazar Slytherin? If Slytherin was so wicked, why is one of the Hogwarts Houses named after him? And why would any student hope to be placed in that House?

6. If Albus Dumbledore is considered one of the greatest wizards of all-time, why is he suspended as Headmaster of Hogwarts? What kind of danger does that leave the school and its future in?

7. Ginny feels foolish for falling under the spell of the diary, especially since her father always warned her "never to trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain." Knowing that, as well as the return of Lord Voldemort, how and why did Ginny get consumed by the diary?

8. In The Chamber of Secrets and The Sorcerer's Stone, Harry is always praised as the hero and gets most of the glory for defeating enemies. Would he be successful without the help of other characters like Ron and Hermione, Dobby, Professor Dumbledore, Hagrid, etc? Why don't they get as much credit as Harry does?

9. Professor Dumbledore tells a doubtful Harry, "It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." (page 333) Do you agree?

10. Will you continue the series and read the third Harry Potter book, The Prisoner of Azkaban? Where do you expect it to pick up? Discuss other predictions for the book.

(Questions by Katherine O'Connor of LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter #3)
J.K. Rowling, 1999
Scholastic Inc.
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780439136365

Summary
For twelve long years, the dread fortress of Azkaban held an infamous prisoner named Sirius Black. Convicted of killing thirteen people with a single curse, he was said to be the heir apparent to the Dark Lord, Voldemort, and might even have assisted in the deaths of James and Lily Potter—Harry Potter’s parents.

Now Black has escaped, leaving only two clues as to where he might be headed: Harry Potter's defeat of You-Know-Who was Black's downfall as well. And the Azkaban guards heard him muttering in his sleep, "He’s at Hogwarts...he’s at Hogwarts."

Of course, Harry already had plenty to worry about. After inflating his nasty aunt and running away on the magical Knight Bus, he finds he’s being pursued by death omens at every turn. He receives two wonderful gifts: a top-of-the-line Firebolt broomstick, and the Marauder’s Map, a magical diagram of Hogwarts made by the mysterious “Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs.” Hermione disappears frequently, burdened down by a seemingly impossible course schedule. And the soulless Dementors have come to guard Hogwarts—supposedly to protect Harry from Sirius Black, but they terrify Harry more than the fugitive ever could.

To strengthen himself against them, Harry reaches out to Remus Lupin, the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher who was once a friend of his father’s. Lupin teaches Harry about the Patronus Charm, a defensive measure well above the level of magic generally mastered by wizards Harry’s age. But even with his broom, his map, his magic, and his loyal friends, Harry isn't safe.

Because on top of everything else, there’s a traitor hidden at Hogwarts... (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—July 31, 1965
• Where—Chipping Sodbury near Bristol, England (UK)
• Education—Exeter University
• Awards—3 Nestle Smarties Awards; British Book Award-
   Children's Book of the Year; Children's Book Award;
   Whitbread Children's Book of the Year; British Book Awards-
   Author of the Year; British Book Awards-Book of the Year.
• Currently—lives in Perthshire, Scotland and London, England

Joanne "Jo" Rowling, better known under the pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author known as the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series, the idea for which was conceived while on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies, and been the basis for a popular series of films.

Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years. As of March 2010, when its latest world billionaires list was published, Forbes estimated Rowling's net worth to be $1 billion. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £560 million ($798 million), ranking her as the twelfth richest woman in Great Britain. Forbes ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007, and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fandom. She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and the Children's High Level Group.

Early years
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (nee Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16.1 km) northeast of Bristol. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce. (The school's headmaster has been suggested as the inspiration for Harry Potter's Albus Dumbledore).

As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would read to her sister. "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called "Rabbit." He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." When she was a young teenager, her great aunt gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.

She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother, Anne, had worked as a technician in the Science Department. Rowling has said of her adolescence, "Hermione [A bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley [Harry Potter's best friend] isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."

Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. After a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.

In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately. In December of that same year, Rowling’s mother died, after a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis, a death that heavily affected her writing: she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992. Their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born in 1993 in Portugal. The couple separated in November 1993. In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.

After Jessica's birth and the separation from her husband, Rowling had left her teaching job in Portugal. In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995, after completing her first novel while having survived on state welfare support.

She wrote in many cafes, especially Nicolson's Cafe, whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. As she stated on the American TV program A&E Biography, one of the reasons she wrote in cafes was not because her flat had no heat, but because taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.

Harry Potter books
In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by Bloomsbury, a small British publishing house in London, England. The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.

Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, her editor Barry Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. Soon after, in 1997, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc., for $105,000. Rowling has said she “nearly died” when she heard the news.

In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print-run of 1000 copies, five hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are valued between £16,000 and £25,000. Five months later, the book won its first award, a Nestle Smarties Book Prize. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year, and later, the Children’s Book Award. Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July, 1998.

In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000, and broke sales records in both countries. Some 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all literary sales records. Rowling admitted that she had had a moment of crisis while writing the novel; "Halfway through writing Four, I realised there was a serious fault with the plot....I've had some of my blackest moments with this book..... One chapter I rewrote 13 times, though no-one who has read it can spot which one or know the pain it caused me." Rowling was named author of the year in the 2000 British Book Awards.

A wait of three years occurred between the release of Goblet of Fire and the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This gap led to press speculation that Rowling had developed writer's block, speculations she fervently denied. Rowling later admitted that writing the book was a chore. "I think Phoenix could have been shorter", she told Lev Grossman, "I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end."

The sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on 16 July 2005. It too broke all sales records, selling nine million copies in its first 24 hours of release. While writing, she told a fan online, "Book six has been planned for years, but before I started writing seriously I spend two months re-visiting the plan and making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing." She noted on her website that the opening chapter of book six, which features a conversation between the Minister of Magic and the British Prime Minister, had been intended as the first chapter first for Philosopher's Stone, then Chamber of Secrets then Prisoner of Azkaban. In 2006, Half-Blood Prince received the Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July, 2007, (0:00 BST) and broke its predecessor's record as the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 11 million copies in the first day of release in the United Kingdom and United States. She has said that the last chapter of the book was written "in something like 1990", as part of her earliest work on the entire series. During a year period when Rowling was completing the last book, she allowed herself to be filmed for a documentary which aired in Britain on ITV on 30 December 2007. It was entitled J K Rowling... A Year In The Life and showed her returning to her old Edinburgh tenement flat where she lived, and completed the first Harry Potter book. Re-visiting the flat for the first time reduced her to tears, saying it was "really where I turned my life around completely."

Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated £7 billion ($15 billion), and the last four Harry Potter books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history. The series, totalling 4,195 pages, has been translated, in whole or in part, into 65 languages.

The Harry Potter books have also gained recognition for sparking an interest in reading among the young at a time when children were thought to be abandoning books for computers and television, although the series' overall impact on children's reading habits has been questioned.

Life after Harry Potter
Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books, the second-richest female entertainer and the 1,062nd richest person in the world. When first listed as a billionaire by Forbes in 2004, Rowling disputed the calculations and said she had plenty of money, but was not a billionaire. In addition, the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List named Rowling the 144th richest person in Britain. In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious nineteenth-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a £4.5 million ($9 million) Georgian house in Kensington, West London, (on a street with 24-hour security).

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Michael Murray (born 30 June 1971), an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her Aberfeldy home. Their son was born in 2003 and a daughter in 2005.

In the UK, Rowling has received honorary degrees from St Andrews University, the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, the University of Exeter and the University of Aberdeen; and in the US, from Harvard. She has been awarded the Légion d'honneur by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (During the Elysée Palace ceremony, she revealed that her maternal French grandfather had also received the Légion d'honneur for his bravery during World War I.) According to Matt Latimer, a former White House administrator for President George W. Bush, Rowling was turned down for the Presidential Medal of Freedom because administration officials believed that the Harry Potter series promoted witchcraft.

Subsequent writing
Rowling has stated that she plans to continue writing, preferably under a pseudonym. Although she "thinks it's unlikely" that she will write another Harry Potter, an "encyclopedia" of wizarding along with unpublished notes may be published sometime in the future. In March 2008, Rowling revealed in interview that she had returned to writing in Edinburgh cafes, intent on composing a new novel for children. "I will continue writing for children because that's what I enjoy," she told the Daily Telegraph. "I am very good at finding a suitable cafe; I blend into the crowd and, of course, I don't sit in the middle of the bar staring all around me." (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
Those thousands of fans already familiar with this series will not be disappointed; Rowling is surprisingly inventive in her small details and startling in her plot twists. And what is particularly pleasing is that Harry grows in this novel, as the thematic concerns of the series grow in complexity. In this, the 3rd Harry Potter book, Harry returns to Hogwarts for his third year. He is shadowed by the knowledge of Sirius Black, a close associate of Lord Voldemort and one-time intimate friend of Harry's parents. Lord Voldemort has escaped from the prison of Azkaban and is undoubtedly looking to avenge himself upon Harry. While struggling with this shadow, Harry also deals with the presence of the Dementors, the guards of Azkaban. The Dementors are looking for Sirus Black because they want to suck all joy and happiness out of those they find, and Harry, because of his past, is particularly susceptible to their powers. Supported by close friends Ron and Hermione, our hero Harry faces Black, fights for the House Cup, and in the end, comes to a new knowledge of his parents that he had never dreamed possible. Here the good and the evil are not so starkly drawn, and may even at times blend in disturbing ways. If the final unraveling of the mystery is a bit clumsy, handled by lengthy and stilted exposition rather than her usual brisk action, Rowling is still wonderfully adept at creating engaging characters and a narrative line that pushes forward at a remarkable pace. —Arthur P. Levine
Alan Review

This book is as daring and thrilling as any fantasy can be. Harry must confront the evil wizard responsible for his parent's death. Foes may wear disguises and appear harmless. Harry, with help from his friends, must use all his wits to discover the truth. In between quidditch games, studying, and coping with being an emerging teen, Harry has to battle the forces out to end his life. This third book flies by with breath-taking adventures and in-depth character development that helps us understand the complex cast with greater appreciation. I'm panting for Book Four.
Children's Literature

Rowling proves that she has plenty of tricks left up her sleeve in this third Harry Potter adventure, set once again at the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Right before the start of term, a supremely dangerous criminal breaks out of a supposedly impregnable wizards' prison; it will come as no surprise to Potter fans that the villain, a henchman of Harry's old enemy Lord Voldemort, appears to have targeted Harry. In many ways this installment seems to serve a transitional role in the seven-volume series: while many of the adventures are breathlessly relayed, they appear to be laying groundwork for even more exciting adventures to come. The beauty here lies in the genius of Rowling's plotting. Seemingly minor details established in books one and two unfold to take on unforeseen significance, and the finale, while not airtight in its internal logic, is utterly thrilling. Rowling's wit never flags, whether constructing the workings of the wizard world (Just how would a magician be made to stay behind bars?) or tossing off quick jokes (a grandmother wears a hat decorated with a stuffed vulture; the divination classroom looks like a tawdry tea shop). The Potter spell is holding strong.
Publishers Weekly

The Harry Potter epic (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) continues to gather speed as Harry enters his third year at the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry and does battle with the traitor behind his parents' deaths. Besides coping with the usual adversaries— sneering classmate Draco Malfoy, evocatively-named Potions Master Snape—the young wizard-in-training has a new worry with the escape of Sirius Black, murderous minion of archenemy Lord Voldemort, from the magicians' prison of Azkaban. Folding in subplots and vividly conceived magical creatures, Azkaban's guards, known as dementors, are the very last brutes readers would want to meet in a dark alley. With characteristic abandon, Rowling creates a busy backdrop for Harry as she pushes him through a series of terrifying encounters and hard-fought games of Quidditch, on the way to a properly pulse-pounding climax strewn with mistaken identities and revelations about his dead father. The main characters and the continuing story both come along so smartly (and Harry at last shows a glimmer of interest in the opposite sex, a sure sign that the tides of adolescence are lapping at his toes) that the book seems shorter than its page count: have readers clear their calendars if they are fans, or get out of the way if they are not.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban:

1. For the past two years, Harry has spent the end of summer with the Weasleys. The Dursleys are terrified of him and have always treated him poorly, so why doesn't Harry just move in with the Weasleys? Also, in The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry's magic causes major problems on Privet Drive. Why do the Dursleys allow Harry to live there?

2. Sirius Black is the most infamous and dangerous prisoner to escape from Azkaban. Immediately before returning to Hogwarts, Arthur Weasley, against a strong warning from his wife, informs Harry that it is believed Black is out to kill him. Black even used to mutter "he's at Hogwarts...he's at Hogwarts" in his sleep whil imprisoned. Why does Harry so badly want to return to school instead of being protected after learning all this? What role does Dumbledore play in his return?

3. Do you think Hagrid makes a better Gamekeeper or Care of Magical Creatures professor? Which of his lesson was your favorite or least favorite?

4. Animals, real and magical, play a huge role in this book. Discuss the importance of Scabbers the rat, Crookshanks the cat, the black dog, Buckbeak the Hippogriff, and the werewolf.

5. Dementors are soulless creaters that guard Azkaban and feed on happiness and positive feelings. Their presence makes things grow cold and dark and force surrounding people to relive their most awful memories. They can perform the Dementor's Kiss where they suck out the victim's soul. Rowling has said that she created the Dementors from her feelings of deep depression. Do you think these creatures are too macabre for a book that children read?

6. In The Chamber of Secrets Lucius Malfoy leads to Dumbledore's suspension as Headmaster and in The Prisoner of Azkaban, he ensures that Buckbeak the Hippogriff will be executed for attacking Draco. Where does Lucius' power come from?

7. Hermione had her own secret this year. Why didn't she share her special tool with Harry and Ron?

8. Harry has repeatadly said that he doesn't feel worthy of the attention he receives because he didn't do anything special when Voldemort attacked him, he literally is only "the boy who lived." But Dumbledore and Lupin continue to give him hints to help him defeat evil. Why are they putting their trust and the fate of the wizarding world in the hands of a 13 year-old boy who has only studied magic for three years?

9. Will you continue the series and read the next Harry Potter book, The Goblet of Fire? Where do you expect it to pick up? Discuss other predictions for the book.

(Questions by Katherine O'Connor of LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter #4)
J.K. Rowling, 2000
Scholastic, Inc.
752 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780439139601

Summary
In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry is midway through both his training as a wizard and his coming of age. He wants to get away from the malicious Dursleys and go to the Quidditch World Cup with Hermione, Ron, and the Weasleys. He wants to dream about his crush, Cho Chang (and maybe do more than dream).

And now that he’s gotten the hang of things at Hogwarts—he hopes—he just wants to be a normal fourteen-year-old wizard.

But even by his standards, Harry's year is anything but normal. First Dumbledore announces the revival of a grand competition that hasn't taken place for one hundred years: the Triwizard Tournament, where a Hogwarts champion will compete against rivals from two other schools of magic in three highly dangerous tasks. Then someone frames Harry to participate in the tournament—which really means someone wants him dead.

Harry is guided through the competition by Professor Alastor Moody, this year's Defenst Against the Dark Arts teacher, but he must also contend with a nasty reporter named Rita Skeeter, who digs up some highly unflattering secrets about Hagrid; a terrible fight with Ron, who is deeply jealous of Harry's fame; Hermione's newfound activism on behalf of house-elves; and the terrifying prospect of asking a date to the Yule Ball.

Worst of all, Lord Voldemort may finally have gathered the materials necessary for his rejuvenation...and he has a faithful servant at Hogwarts waiting only for a sign. No, nothing is every normal for Harry Potter. And in his case, different can be deadly. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—July 31, 1965
• Where—Chipping Sodbury near Bristol, England (UK)
• Education—Exeter University
• Awards—3 Nestle Smarties Awards; British Book Award-
   Children's Book of the Year; Children's Book Award;
   Whitbread Children's Book of the Year; British Book Awards-
   Author of the Year; British Book Awards-Book of the Year.
• Currently—lives in Perthshire, Scotland and London, England

Joanne "Jo" Rowling, better known under the pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author known as the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series, the idea for which was conceived while on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies, and been the basis for a popular series of films.

Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years. As of March 2010, when its latest world billionaires list was published, Forbes estimated Rowling's net worth to be $1 billion. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £560 million ($798 million), ranking her as the twelfth richest woman in Great Britain. Forbes ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007, and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fandom. She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and the Children's High Level Group.

Early years
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (nee Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16.1 km) northeast of Bristol. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce. (The school's headmaster has been suggested as the inspiration for Harry Potter's Albus Dumbledore).

As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would read to her sister. "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called "Rabbit." He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." When she was a young teenager, her great aunt gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.

She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother, Anne, had worked as a technician in the Science Department. Rowling has said of her adolescence, "Hermione [A bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley [Harry Potter's best friend] isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."

Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. After a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.

In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately. In December of that same year, Rowling’s mother died, after a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis, a death that heavily affected her writing: she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992. Their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born in 1993 in Portugal. The couple separated in November 1993. In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.

After Jessica's birth and the separation from her husband, Rowling had left her teaching job in Portugal. In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995, after completing her first novel while having survived on state welfare support.

She wrote in many cafes, especially Nicolson's Cafe, whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. As she stated on the American TV program A&E Biography, one of the reasons she wrote in cafes was not because her flat had no heat, but because taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.

Harry Potter books
In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by Bloomsbury, a small British publishing house in London, England. The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.

Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, her editor Barry Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. Soon after, in 1997, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc., for $105,000. Rowling has said she “nearly died” when she heard the news.

In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print-run of 1000 copies, five hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are valued between £16,000 and £25,000. Five months later, the book won its first award, a Nestle Smarties Book Prize. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year, and later, the Children’s Book Award. Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July, 1998.

In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000, and broke sales records in both countries. Some 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all literary sales records. Rowling admitted that she had had a moment of crisis while writing the novel; "Halfway through writing Four, I realised there was a serious fault with the plot....I've had some of my blackest moments with this book..... One chapter I rewrote 13 times, though no-one who has read it can spot which one or know the pain it caused me." Rowling was named author of the year in the 2000 British Book Awards.

A wait of three years occurred between the release of Goblet of Fire and the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This gap led to press speculation that Rowling had developed writer's block, speculations she fervently denied. Rowling later admitted that writing the book was a chore. "I think Phoenix could have been shorter", she told Lev Grossman, "I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end."

The sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on 16 July 2005. It too broke all sales records, selling nine million copies in its first 24 hours of release. While writing, she told a fan online, "Book six has been planned for years, but before I started writing seriously I spend two months re-visiting the plan and making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing." She noted on her website that the opening chapter of book six, which features a conversation between the Minister of Magic and the British Prime Minister, had been intended as the first chapter first for Philosopher's Stone, then Chamber of Secrets then Prisoner of Azkaban. In 2006, Half-Blood Prince received the Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July, 2007, (0:00 BST) and broke its predecessor's record as the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 11 million copies in the first day of release in the United Kingdom and United States. She has said that the last chapter of the book was written "in something like 1990", as part of her earliest work on the entire series. During a year period when Rowling was completing the last book, she allowed herself to be filmed for a documentary which aired in Britain on ITV on 30 December 2007. It was entitled J K Rowling... A Year In The Life and showed her returning to her old Edinburgh tenement flat where she lived, and completed the first Harry Potter book. Re-visiting the flat for the first time reduced her to tears, saying it was "really where I turned my life around completely."

Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated £7 billion ($15 billion), and the last four Harry Potter books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history. The series, totalling 4,195 pages, has been translated, in whole or in part, into 65 languages.

The Harry Potter books have also gained recognition for sparking an interest in reading among the young at a time when children were thought to be abandoning books for computers and television, although the series' overall impact on children's reading habits has been questioned.

Life after Harry Potter
Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books, the second-richest female entertainer and the 1,062nd richest person in the world. When first listed as a billionaire by Forbes in 2004, Rowling disputed the calculations and said she had plenty of money, but was not a billionaire. In addition, the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List named Rowling the 144th richest person in Britain. In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious nineteenth-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a £4.5 million ($9 million) Georgian house in Kensington, West London, (on a street with 24-hour security).

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Michael Murray (born 30 June 1971), an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her Aberfeldy home. Their son was born in 2003 and a daughter in 2005.

In the UK, Rowling has received honorary degrees from St Andrews University, the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, the University of Exeter and the University of Aberdeen; and in the US, from Harvard. She has been awarded the Légion d'honneur by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (During the Elysée Palace ceremony, she revealed that her maternal French grandfather had also received the Légion d'honneur for his bravery during World War I.) According to Matt Latimer, a former White House administrator for President George W. Bush, Rowling was turned down for the Presidential Medal of Freedom because administration officials believed that the Harry Potter series promoted witchcraft.

Subsequent writing
Rowling has stated that she plans to continue writing, preferably under a pseudonym. Although she "thinks it's unlikely" that she will write another Harry Potter, an "encyclopedia" of wizarding along with unpublished notes may be published sometime in the future. In March 2008, Rowling revealed in interview that she had returned to writing in Edinburgh cafes, intent on composing a new novel for children. "I will continue writing for children because that's what I enjoy," she told the Daily Telegraph. "I am very good at finding a suitable cafe; I blend into the crowd and, of course, I don't sit in the middle of the bar staring all around me." (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
As the midpoint in a projected seven-book series, Goblet of Fire is exactly the big, clever, vibrant, tremendously assured installment that gives shape and direction to the whole undertaking and still somehow preserves the material's enchanting innocence. This time Ms. Rowling offers her clearest proof yet of what should have been wonderfully obvious: what makes the Potter books so popular is the radically simple fact that they're so good.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

The Harry Potter series is a supernatural version of ''Tom Brown's Schooldays,'' updated and given a hip this-is-how-kids-really-are shine. And Harry is the kid most children feel themselves to be, adrift in a world of unimaginative and often unpleasant adults—Muggles, Rowling calls them—who neither understand them nor care to. Harry is, in fact, a male Cinderella, waiting for someone to invite him to the ball. In Potter 1, his invitation comes first by owl (in the magic world of J. K. Rowling, owls deliver the mail) and then by Sorting Hat; in the current volume it comes from the Goblet of Fire, smoldering and shedding glamorous sparks. How nice to be invited to the ball! Even for a relatively old codger like me, it's still nice to be invited to the ball.
Stephen King - New York Times Book Review

Once again, Rowling packs the pages with witty and imaginative ideas.... Fourth year report? Another fine year, Ms Rowling. Three more to go and it looks as though your OWLS (Ordinary Wizarding Levels) results will be terrific.
Sarah Johnson - Times (London)

[T]his is storytelling of a high order indeed. It draws the reader in with a riddle and a letter. It proceeds through a series of trials to a great confrontation. And it concludes with a death and a climactic resolution. E.M. Forster famously observed that, 'Yes—oh dear, yes—the novel tells a story'. HP IV is the apotheosis of 'story.'
Robert McCrum - Guardian

Keeps up the awesome inventiveness, deadpan humor and gripping pace of previous installments.... As usual, Rowling flawlessly knits her plotlines together, with seemingly casual early details taking on meaningful force by the end.
Rebekah Denn - Seattle Post-Intelligencer

This fourth volume of Harry's adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is up to the high standards of its predecessors, full of fantasy, suspense, humor and horror. All the familiar characters are back—Harry's faithful friends Ron and Hermione (she takes on the cause of enslaved house-elves here), professors both kind and nasty, and Moaning Myrtle the ghost, among others—and there are some new characters, too, like the half-giantess Madame Maxime, a little house-elf named Winky, and "Mad-Eye" Moody, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. And defense is needed; because Harry's great enemy Lord Voldemort has risen again, with a new plot to kill Harry. There is a Quidditch World Cup, to supply some sports action, and even more important for Harry, a dangerous Triwizard Tournament in which he is a competitor. At 14, Harry and his friends are starting to mature, and boy-girl relationships are beginning to play a role in their lives, making this book of even greater interest to the YA audience. For all libraries. —Paula Rohrlick
KLIATT

Even without the unprecedented media attention and popularity her magical series has attracted, it would seem too much to hope that Rowling could sustain the brilliance and wit of her first three novels. Astonishingly, Rowling seems to have the spell-casting powers she assigns her characters: this fourth volume might be her most thrilling yet.

The novel opens as a confused Muggle overhears Lord Voldemort and his henchman, Wormtail (the escapee from book three, Azkaban) discussing a murder and plotting more deaths (and invoking Harry Potter's name); clues suggest that Voldemort and Wormtail's location will prove highly significant.

From here it takes a while (perhaps slightly too long a while) for Harry and his friends to get back to the Hogwarts school, where Rowling is on surest footing. Headmaster Dumbledore appalls everyone by declaring that Quidditch competition has been canceled for the year, then he makes the exciting announcement that the Triwizard Tournament is to be held after a cessation of many hundred years (it was discontinued, he explains, because the death toll mounted so high). One representative from each of the three largest wizardry schools of Europe (sinister Durmstrang, luxurious Beauxbatons and Hogwarts) are to be chosen by the Goblet of Fire; because of the mortal dangers, Dumbledore casts a spell that allows only students who are at least 17 to drop their names into the Goblet. Thus no one foresees that the Goblet will announce a fourth candidate: Harry. Who has put his name into the Goblet, and how is his participation in the tournament linked, as it surely must be, to Voldemort's newest plot?

The details are as ingenious and original as ever, and somehow (for catching readers off-guard must certainly get more difficult with each successive volume) Rowling plants the red herrings, the artful clues and tricky surprises that disarm the most attentive audience. A climax even more spectacular than that of Azkaban will leave readers breathless; the muscle-building heft of this volume notwithstanding, the clamor for book five will begin as soon as readers finish installment four.
Publishers Weekly

As the bells and whistles of the greatest prepublication hoopla in children's book history fade, what's left in the clearing smoke is—unsurprisingly, considering Rowling's track record—another grand tale of magic and mystery, of wheels within wheels oiled in equal measure by terror and comedy, featuring an engaging young hero-in-training who's not above the occasional snit, and clicking along so smoothly that it seems shorter than it is. Good thing, too, with this page count. That's not to say that the pace doesn't lag occasionally—particularly near the end when not one but two bad guys halt the action for extended accounts of their misdeeds and motives—or that the story lacks troubling aspects. As Harry wends his way through a fourth year of pranks, schemes, intrigue, danger and triumph at Hogwarts, the racial and class prejudice of many wizards moves to the forefront, with hooded wizards gathering to terrorize an isolated Muggle family in one scene while authorities do little more than wring their hands. There's also the later introduction of Hogwarts' house elves as a clan of happy slaves speaking nonstandard English. These issues may be resolved in sequels, but in the meantime, they are likely to leave many readers, particularly American ones, uncomfortable. Still, opening with a thrilling Quidditch match, and closing with another wizardly competition that is also exciting, for very different reasons, this sits at the center of Rowling's projected seven volume saga and makes a sturdy, heartstopping (doorstopping) fulcrum for it.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:

1. When Harry's name mysteriously emerges from the Goblet of Fire why won't anyone believe him when he says that he didn't submit it himself? Dumbledore, in particular, seems angry with Harry for the first time. Ron and Harry's friendship suffers until after the first challenge. These two people had never questioned Harry before, so why now? Should they have known that there was an outside force involved?

2. Harry has always had an instinct to help others. He informs Cedric that the first challenge in the Triwizard Tournament involves dragons and he rescues Fleur's sister from the lake though it means he will not win the challenge. How does this instinct help him in the tournament and how does it hurt him? Why does Harry risk his own chances of winning?

3. When was the first time you suspected Mad-Eye Mooney might be dangerous?

4. The maze challenge is the only in the tournament to take place at night. How does this setting change the mood of the story? What would have changed if it had taken place in daylight?

5. Hermione learns that Rita Skeeter is an unregistered Animagus that is able to turn into a beetle. Recall the instances when Harry and friends mentioned the presence of a pesky bug.

6. Lupin once said about Azkaban prison, "They don't need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they're traped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks." How are Sirius Black, in The Prisoner of Azkaban, and Barty Crouch Jr. able to devise clever plans and escape when all other prisoners are practically lifeless?

7. Although money has always been uncomfortably tight for the Weasley family, Harry has never offered to share his inheritence with them before, even though at times he wanted to. What makes him decide to give his tournament winnings to Fred and George to open a joke shop?

8. In the graveyard Voldemort reveals that on the night he killed Harry's parents, Harry survived because of his mother's sacrifice. He explained, "His mother died in the attempt to save him—and unwittingly provided him with a protection that I admit I had not foreseen.... I could not touch the boy." (p. 652). Because he survived that attack, Harry has been labeled as a great wizard. Has he truly earned that title?

9. This was the first of the Harry Potter series to be released at the same time in the UK and the United States. It attracted more attention because of a pre-publication statement from Rowling that one of the characters would be murdered in this book. Why did Rowling do this? If you knew this, did it change the way you read the book?

10. What are some loose ends left open that need to be resolved in the last three books? Does Rowling successfully balance The Goblet of Fire having it's own satisfying ending and leaving questions unanswered for the rest of the series?

11. The final chapter of The Goblet of Fire is tittled "The Beginning." What is beginning and what has ended? What challenges do you predict Harry and his friends will face in the fifth book, The Order of the Phoenix?

(Questions by Katherine O'Connor of LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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